A Path Planning Algorithm with a Guaranteed Distance Cost in Wireless Sensor Networks

Navigation with wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is the key to provide an effective path for the mobile node. Without any location information, the path planning algorithm generates a big challenge. Many algorithms provided efficient paths based on tracking sensor nodes which forms a competitive method. However, most previous works have overlooked the distance cost of the path. In this paper, the problem is how to obtain a path with minimum distance cost and effectively organize the network to ensure the availability of this path. We first present a distributed algorithm to construct a path planning infrastructure by uniting the neighbors’ information of each sensor node into an improved connected dominating set. Then, a path planning algorithm is proposed which could produce a path with its length at most c times the shortest Euclidean length from initial position to destination. We prove that the distributed algorithm has low time and message complexity and c is no more than a constant. Under different deployed environments, extensive simulations evaluate the effectiveness of our work. The results show that factor c is within the upper bound proved in this paper and our distributed algorithm achieves a smaller infrastructure size.